On January 06 and 07, the days of Christmas Eve and Orthodox Christmas, many believers will ride to the temple of St. Sava in Vracar, to attend burning of the Oak tree and the Christmas Liturgy. At the top of the dome of the temple, through the narrow opening between the floor structure, and through the protective net, they will be able to see the delicacy of a magnificent mosaic showing the success of Jesus Christ. This mosaic makes a new rug of the Temple. The works began in the spring of 2017, and they have already been formally completed, but additional embellishment will take another month or two.

The mosaic, depicting the ascension of Jesus Christ, is the work of Russia’s leading iconographer, Nikolai Mukhin. It has a 30-meter diameter and spreads on an area of 1,248 square meters, weighing a total of 40 tons. The arrangement of this dome was one of the largest projects of mosaic decorating of the curved area in the world. Mosaic was installed by Russian and Serbian artists, thanks to the four million Euros donation of Gazprom Neft, Russian oil and gas company.

St. Sava’s Temple is the largest Orthodox temple in Europe, whose construction began in the 1930s in Belgrade’s central Vracar municipality, at the site where the occupying Ottoman Turks burned the remains of St. Sava (1175-1236), the founder and first patriarch of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church.

All photographs by Marko Risović. Any use without written permission from the author is strictly forbidden!